In the aftermath of Google’s services experiencing a global blackout, the web giant has so far failed to provide an explanation for the disruption.

During the outage, online traffic across the world reportedly fell by approximately 40%.

All services, including search, Gmail and YouTube, were down for around five minutes yesterday evening.

Sky News Online contacted Google, but the company neglected to give an explanation for the worldwide outage.

Speaking about the impact, a developer for web analytics company GoSquared said:

“That’s huge. As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge.

“It’s also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination.”

The Google Apps Dashboard showed a message that confirmed all of the company’s services were affected. It read:

“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour.”

Tribal Worldwide’s Phil Dearson said he believes it cost the web giant around £330,000 – despite the outage lasting for just a few minutes.

He added that while Google’s services had previously experienced a technical issue or two, never before had all of its services gone down at once.

The fact that a brief outage had such widespread repercussions is a reflection on Google’s dominant position in the search market – and a nod towards the importance of engaging in user friendly search engine optimization to cater for its search traffic.